What makes Canaveral National Seashore so revered in Florida is that visitors can commune with the wildest nature, some two-dozen miles of Atlantic surf rolling onto beaches never reconstructed, far from T-shirt shops and conjuring a sense of before European conquest.
A surprise and decisive beating by Hurricane Nicole in November has altered how visitors, 2.2 million last year, will experience Canaveral’s nature and has set the stage for more disruption to the longest wilderness coast along Florida’s Atlantic coast.
Today, nearly a half-century into its existence, the national seashore is at an existential crossroads. The Category 1 Nicole did something more damaging than fling debris of costly boardwalks and bury parking lots under uncalculated tons of sand.
Nicole carved up essential dunes along half of the seashore, removing an incredible amount of sand that had walled off the surf zone and beach from the skinny blacktop and string of parking lots on the other side. Without dunes and their defensive shields of seagrapes and palmettos, scenery is startlingly changed, encompassing at a glance the adjoining waters of the Atlantic to the east and the Indian River to the west.
Canaveral’s southern and most popular stretch of seashore, Playalinda Beach, remains closed for health, safety and access reasons. Parts are littered with splintered boards spiked with stainless-steel nails, its vault-style bathrooms are clogged with sand and the access road and parking lots are navigable in areas only with a well driven four-wheel-drive.
While Nicole drew national headlines for savaging private homes and properties along Volusia County coast to the north, keepers of the public seashore quietly have been trying to formulate how to pursue questions of when, where, under what conditions and, the toughest, if visitors won’t be allowed to venture back to at least some portions of Playalinda.
“I’ve been here 28 years and seen a lot of storms,” said Laura Henning, spokesperson and among a staff of 45 at Canaveral National Seashore.” Now, every time I come here I am in shock. I think everybody is feeling that way.”
The park service’s mission combines environmental protection and visitor enjoyment. There is little inclination for not fully reopening Canaveral’s Playalinda, Henning said, but neither is there much inclination for trying to stop nature from being nature.
“It’s just not going to be the same as it was,” Henning said. “It can’t be.”
The southern half of Canaveral National Seashore, Playalinda Beach, has 14 parking lots strung out along 6 miles of a two-lane blacktop. The lots combined offer 1,200 spaces.
Playalinda in Brevard County was meant to welcome more visitation than the northern end Canaveral National Seashore, Apollo Beach in Volusia County, which has 250 parking spaces along 6 miles of access road.
That’s because when the nation’s space agency acquired lands for what is now Kennedy Space Center, Titusville was robbed of its beach – what is now Playalinda. The National Park Service, in effect, provides the city with its historic beach.
The first five lots and their extensive boardwalks that meet ADA requirements escaped major punishment from Nicole. The dunes along those five beach accesses are the seashore’s tallest and most robust.
Henning said the seashore staff has concentrated on reopening the first five lots to the public, slated for early January.
The fate of the next eight parking and access areas is an open question.
The dunes along that stretch of road were not as robust and the barrier island that Canaveral National Seashore occupies narrows there.
It’s there where Nicole left a moonscape along the access road and parking areas.
It’s where so much dune sand vanished, replaced by smooth beach lapped by waves.
And it’s where park staff suspect that with further storms, Canaveral National Seashore may be cut in half, breached by an inlet of Atlantic waters to the inshore Indian River Lagoon.
In an area of potential for such an inlet, about a half-mile beyond the last parking lot, Kristen Kneifl, Canaveral’s chief of resource management, found herself trying to make sense of the new landscape.
“It doesn’t look like our park,” Kneifl said. “It reminds me of somewhere in the Bahamas, or somewhere over on the Panhandle, or a flat moonscape basically. It looks very different, leveled, flat.”
There is another area seashore, about halfway along the 6 mile road, also showing vulnerability to high tides or storms cutting an inlet from the ocean to the Indian River.
“We’ve always known this is coming,” Kneifl said. “It just happened sooner than we all thought. We’ve always said ‘what would we do? Would we just let it go back to nature, would we build a bridge, would we reroute the road?’”
Kneifl said that while options are being assembled, “some of it might not be our choice,” meaning that nature may dictate critical steps ahead.
The inputs for making choices are interacting and daunting. Hurricane Nicole’s scraping away of dunes along half of the seashore park significantly degraded two-thirds of the beach space where 14,000 sea turtles nests were documented this year.
Canaveral dunes are essential habitat for the federally endangered southeastern beach mouse.
A host of protected marine birds spend some or all of their lives there.
“We also know the park is highly loved by the community,” Kneifl said.
Charting a future for the park means determining what to rebuild, or not to rebuild, whether sea rise already has decided that parts of the seashore will be cut off by inlets and whether the seashore is vulnerable to hurricanes strengthened by a warming climate.
Kneifl said the park has enlisted the U.S. Geological Survey, National Park Service geologists and is reaching out to others.
The National Park Service generally would forbid measures such as installing sea walls or dredging sand to renourish beaches and rebuild dunes.
“It’s doing what a barrier island is supposed to do,” Kneifl said of Canaveral’s reconfiguration by Hurricane Nicole.
In that sense, infrastructure such as boardwalks and roadway was damaged, while dunes of the Canaveral’s barrier island were relocated and repurposed — what dunes do on a barrier island.
“It just happens to be a barrier island used by a lot of visitors and used by a lot of sea turtles,” Kneifl said.
Joe Donoghue, a retired geology professor at the University of Central Florida, said the greater barrier island that includes Canaveral National Seashore has been in its current state more or less for 6,000 years.
“There’s evidence that several storm-induced inlets have existed,” Donoghue said. “Major storms level the dunes and in some places create new inlets. The inlets persist for some period of years or decades and then fill in. Dunes rebuild and a quasi-equilibrium is reached again.”
Storm effects of battered dunes and new inlets are not new, he said. “It’s just that nature operates on one time scale and humans on another.”
The Canaveral stretch of the coastline is geologically healthy and should rebuild over time, Donoghue said. “Of course, sea level rise may overcome the natural processes,” he said of an expected acceleration of sea rise for centuries because of global warming.
Henning and Kneifl said one major response tentatively favored by park staff is doing away with the most vulnerable boardwalks that had provided access over dunes. In their places, marked paths would lead to beaches and could be equipped with removable plastic mats for stability.
Charles Lee of Audubon Florida long has been mindful of suspicions that NASA, the owner of lands designated as the Canaveral National Seashore and Merritt Island National Wildlife Refuge, wants to expand launch facilities into the two conservation areas.
The first parking lot of Playalinda Beach is less than 2 miles from the nearest Kennedy Space Center launchpad.
The pummeling by hurricanes of Canaveral’s Playalinda Beach, according to the suspicions, would be an excuse for NASA’s expansions.
But with storm damage and rising sea levels, and indications that a new inlet will cut through Canaveral National Seashore, there may be a more innovative way to accommodate visitors than the long-standing use of private cars and parking areas, Lee said.
“A bicycle trail, combined with a tram to shuttle visitors on a narrower path may be more appropriate,” Lee said. Florida’s park service and national seashores elsewhere have adopted that approach. “It works quite well.”
Clay Henderson, a lawyer specializing in environmental conservation and longtime advocate for Canaveral National Seashore, said he, too, has monitored NASA’s desires to push Kennedy Space Center operations or impacts into Canaveral National Seashore.
“You know there will be behind the scenes efforts to not rebuild and further limit public access,” Henderson said. “We hope that isn’t the case.”
Even without a NASA shadow on Canaveral’s future, the park service faces a difficult task in balancing public recreation and resource protection.
“This is a tough one,” Henderson said. “It’s hard to believe those big dune and walkovers are gone.”
When not focused on damaged boardwalks, loss of turtle nesting beach and challenges ahead for park management, Kneifl said she has a renewed way of looking at Canaveral National Seashore in the aftermath of Hurricane Nicole.
“It’s quite beautiful,” she said. “That wildness of it – it’s just gorgeous.”
